The following article was originally posted on April 9, 2010 at 5:27pm ET. By overwhelming request, and in honor of the Adobe’s killing of mobile Flash, we repost it here:

“By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms,” Lee Brimelow, Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist, blogs for The Flash Blog.

“Obviously Adobe is looking into this wording carefully so I will not comment any further until there is an official conclusion,” Brimelow writes.

MacDailyNews Take: Brimelow then inexplicably proceeds to comment further. This marks just the first of his many lies. Of course, in order to evangelize Adobe’s Flash, you have to be a liar.

Brimelow continues, “What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe.”

MacDailyNews Take: Whiners whine and liars lie and sometimes they’re one and same. We already explained this quite clearly earlier today: “Flash is a proprietary, resource-hogging, browser-crashing abomination and we don’t want ported software on our iPhones, iPads, iPods or Macs; software designed for the lowest common denominator is inferior to software designed to take advantage of individual platforms’ strengths.”

As John Gruber writes over on Daring Fireball, “My opinion is that iPhone users will be well-served by this rule. The App Store is not lacking for quantity of titles. Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turd that doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.” Full article here.

Adobe should understand programming for lowest common denominator implicitly because they long ago turned their backs on the very platform that made their company in order to design their apps for Windows, the lowest common denominator. That is why Mac users suffer with inferior Adobe software today. Adobe should have focused more on Apple’s Mac instead of foolishly waiting for the platform to die and then, when it didn’t drop dead as they hoped, treating Mac users as second-class citizens while pimping inferior Windows PCs.

In addition, “The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple’s plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can’t do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn’t behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider. Full article here.

Brimelow continues, “The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies. All we want is to provide creative professionals an avenue to deploy their work to as many devices as possible.”

MacDailyNews Take: So, Adobe doesn’t want to own the proprietary toolset to generate profits by controlling the Web’s multimedia platform. The charitable angels at Adobe just want to provide creative professionals with blah, blah, blah. Well then, Adobe should drop Flash into the dumpster where it belongs, and embrace the creation of cross-platform tools that enable people to deploy open standards, such as HTML5, that actually will work on as many devices as possible, including 85+ million iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.

Brimelow continues, “Many of Adobe’s supporters have mentioned that we should discontinue the Creative Suite products on OS X as a form of retaliation. Again, this is something that Adobe would never consider in a million years. We are not looking to abuse our loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company. What is clear is that Apple most definitely would do that sort of thing as is evidenced by their recent behavior.”

MacDailyNews Take: Adobe won’t do that because they’d go under. Real creative professionals use Macs. Adobe can’t live off Windows sufferers trying to use pirated copies of Photoshop or mangling amateur video with Adobe’s craptastic Premiere.

Brimelow continues, “Personally I will not be giving Apple another cent of my money until there is a leadership change over there. I’ve already moved most of my book, music, and video purchases to Amazon and I will continue to look elsewhere. Now, I want to be clear that I am not suggesting you do the same and I’m also not trying to organize some kind of boycott. Me deciding not to give money to Apple is not going to do anything to their bottom line. But this is equivalent to me walking into Macy’s to buy a new wallet and the salesperson spits in my face. Chances are I won’t be buying my wallets at Macy’s anymore, no matter how much I like them.”

MacDailyNews Take: Adobe’s Platform Evangelist relegates himself to second-rate media services and that’s supposed to be some big statement? A big joke is more like it; we’re certainly laughing.

Brimelow continues, “Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.”

Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting brand new iPad users or 35+ million iPod touch users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.

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14 Comments

LMAO……. You know exactly how badly you hurt them by the way they react. When Adobe starts kicking and screaming like little spoiled children, you know for a fact that SJ just hit them where it hurts. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />

Exactly as MDN put it: Without Apple and the Macintosh platform, there probably wouldn’t even BE an Adobe, unless they invented some sort of DOS Command Line Enhancer and managed to scam Microsoft into using it.

It’s all about the new multi-tasking APIs. It completely makes sense. This is why the new restriction only applies to iPhone OS 4. If Apple just wanted to give these apps the bird they would simply update the existing developer agreement.

It’s not about hating on flash (even thought it sucks). It’s about making sure apps work properly with the new multitasking stuff in OS 4.

Flash never got over the first hurdle — they never got it to work on iOS, or (for the vast bulk of the time since 2007) on any other mobile OS.

Eventually they got something up — “mobile Flash” which couldn’t even handle regular Flash content. And I heard it described as “not frames-per-second, but seconds-per-frame”.

Apple has always focused on shipping products that worked, and worked at a level well above most of what the rest of industry routinely shipped.

This is all well known – their operation wasn’t meant for amateur hour. Adobe knew the bar they needed to clear and they never could clear it — this, from a major tech corporation with deep experience in development.

I believe that’s part of the reason why you weren’t given a block/unblock button: it simply wasn’t functional.